Media Response to the Throne Speech (2)
B.C. needs to look beyond its borders to really go green
Pete McMartin, Vancouver Sun, 15-Feb-2007
B.C. needs to look beyond its borders to really go green
Domestic emissions goals don't stop what we export to others
Pete McMartin
Vancouver Sun
February 15, 2007
From my neighbourhood, you can hear the big coal trains from the Interior rumbling out to Roberts Bank. They are long and slow and inexorable in their momentum. They snake past farmers' fields and leafy suburbs, and in their single-minded crawl toward the railhead they seem to pass disinterested through the landscape around them. While we tend our little gardens and mow our lush lawns, the giant trains fix their eyes on a point over the horizon at the blast furnaces of Japan and China.
But that's a world away. Out of sight, out of mind.
At home, we're going green.
The science is clear, the premier says.
Any government that doesn't do something about global warming will soon be voted out of office, though that may not be exactly the way he put it.
The government is now committed to reducing greenhouse gas emissions in the province (keep that phrase in mind) to 10 per cent below 1990 levels by the year 2020.
That would mean a reduction of about a third of present levels. This would make B.C. a North American leader in GHG reductions.
How the government hopes to effect this reduction was not made entirely clear in the throne speech. Part of the strategy will entail emission standards for new vehicles. These standards will be phased in between 2009 and 2016.
Well, hmm. By that time, I'm betting, the auto industry will have moved toward that point voluntarily. The Japanese showed the way with smaller cars and hybrid technology; Detroit will follow out of self-preservation.
On the other hand, new emission standards might act as a corrective against the provincial government's own luxury tax, a tax set so high that new car owners can buy high-end gas-guzzling SUVs and minivans without penalty.
Those guzzlers now constitute over 50 per cent of our car fleet, a huge growth over the last decade that the province's own scientists say is responsible for the rise in GHGs in our transportation sector.
If the province claims to be an innocent bystander in the growth in SUVs and minivans, it sure didn't do anything to stop it. Maybe this will.
That is good.
That is a first step in the right direction. The Campbell government is to be congratulated.
But a "but" if I may?
Regulating carbon emissions in our own backyard is the easy part.
Something much harder, and more complicated, is having an effect on the GHGs emissions we export to other countries.
For example, in the throne speech, Campbell signalled he may put the brakes on the two coal-fired generating plants talked about for Princeton and Tumbler Ridge.
That's very nice, but China, according to Der Spiegel, which recently published an unflattering environmental profile of the country, is building a new coal-fired generating plant every seven to 10 days.
Most of the coal B.C. exports to China is metallurgical and not used for generating power, but it is used in blast furnaces for building the goods that we here in Canada have an insatiable appetite for. It's easy to bash China's industries for their abysmal environmental records: it's another thing to look in the mirror and curb those appetites that fuel those industries. Meanwhile, B.C.'s coal exports to China are expected to rise significantly in the next few years, while the government, the one intent on cutting GHGs here at home, is busy drumming up new business there.
Or how about our exports of oil and gas? As Scott Simpson, The Vancouver Sun's energy reporter reminded me, Canada is responsible for about 18 per cent of the U.S.'s gas consumption.
Americans are the gas junkies of the world and lead the globe in production of GHGs.
While it is laudable to curb the GHG emissions on the cars we drive here, we shouldn't forget that we're the single largest source of oil and natural gas for the U.S. If Americans are energy junkies, we live well by feeding their habit.
Are we willing to give up that life, or change it?
That's the tough question and that's the hard part. How much of our present style of life are we willing to change to go green, not just in B.C., but in the world that begins at Roberts Bank?
© The Vancouver Sun 2007
Posted by Arthur Caldicott on 15 Feb 2007